Major-General Mordechai Hod

Major-General Mordechai 'Mottie' Hod , who died on Sunday aged 76, was Commander of the Israeli Air Force in its finest hour, the Six-Day war of 1967.

Israeli doctrine then dictated that, if war were imminent, Israel should use its air power to knock out Arab air forces before they could take off.

On May 23 1967 Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and this was perceived by Levi Eshkol's government as a casus belli. The cabinet authorised an attack upon Egypt.

On the afternoon of Sunday June 4 Hod briefed his wing commanders and, early the next morning, he arrived at his headquarters to direct this crucial phase of the war.

Hod took a calculated risk by committing all but 12 of his combat aircraft to the pre-emptive strike. At 7.10 am, he dispatched a first wave of 183 aircraft and, soon after, a second wave of 164. Flying out to sea, they descended to avoid detection by radar, and made for the Egyptian coast. It took 45 minutes for the first wave to reach its targets. "These were," Hod later recalled, "the longest 45 minutes of my life."

At exactly 7.55 am, Hod's pilots struck. The Defence Minister, Moshe Dayan, recalled: "Mottie [Hod] and his senior staff officers sat in the front row facing a glass partition, and I sat just behind them . . . I was watching Mottie drink jugful after jugful of water, as he followed his pilots with deep anxiety."

After two hours and 50 minutes the Egyptian Air Force was in ruins, and Hod needed only another hour to finish off the Jordanian and Syrian Air Forces. By midday of June 5, he had total control of the skies. By the end of the war, his pilots had flown 3,280 sorties (close to three per pilot, per day) and they destroyed a total of 451 Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi aircraft - 391 on the ground and 60 in aerial combat.

Hod was born Mordechai Fein in Kibbutz Degania, northern Palestine, in 1926 and educated at the regional Agriculture College. At 18, he joined the British Army, serving during the Second World War as a driver in the Royal Army Service Corps.

After the war Hod was recruited by Palmach, the elite strike force of Hagana (the Jewish underground militia in Palestine, then under the British mandate), and remained in Europe helping Jewish survivors to immigrate to Palestine.

In Rome, however, he was jailed for conducting illegal activities. He was released after two weeks, but remained in Italy, where he took part in a pilots' course. He then went to Czechoslovakia, where he took another course learning to fly Spitfires and Messerschmitt Bf-109s, after which he joined a group of pilots whose task was to fly recently purchased Spitfires to Israel.

Equipped with reserve fuel tanks, Hod took off from Czechoslovakia and headed to Israel. It was a seven-hour non-stop flight, during which one aircraft crashed in the sea and two were forced to put down in Rhodes.

On December 22 1948, Hod landed his Spitfire in Israel; he always remembered this experience as one of the most difficult of his long military career. He then took part in the first Israeli Air Force flying course and won his wings on March 14 1949.

In 1950, Hod was sent to Britain to train on jet combat aircraft. Returning home, he taught Israeli pilots to fly the Meteors which Israel purchased from Britain; in 1951 he had his first squadron command (Mustang aircraft).

During the 1956 Sinai campaign, Hod led an Ouragan squadron which escorted the aircraft dropping Israeli paratroopers close to the Suez canal; later in this war Hod led his squadron in supplying air cover for the ground forces.

In 1957 Hod was appointed a Base Commander; in 1960, Head of Operations in the Air Force; and in 1961 he took charge of the Air Department in the General Staff. On April 27 1966, he was made commander of the Air Force aged only 40.

On April 7 1967 Hod directed an operation which resulted in six Syrian MiGs being shot down in a dogfight with Israeli pilots; two were shot down over Damascus, which became one of the main events leading to the Six-Day War.

Soon after the 1967 war, Nasser launched a War of Attrition on Israel by bombing its positions along the Suez canal. From January to April 1970, Hod dispatched his pilots to hit targets deep in Egypt, aiming to force the Egyptian army to transfer forces from the Suez canal zone to protect its cities.

The war was soon concluded, but at considerable cost. Because of this "Strategy of Deep-Penetration", as it was called, Egypt asked the Soviet Union to intervene. The USSR supplied sophisticated weaponry, notably Surface-to-Air Missiles (SAMs), which were to inflict considerable losses on the Israeli Air Force during the early stages of the 1973 war.

When Hod realised that Soviet pilots were flying Egyptian aircraft, he asked for his government's permission to confront them. This was a sensitive issue, because it would mean a military clash between Israeli and Soviet forces for the first time; after lengthy discussions, government permission was granted.

In the early afternoon of July 30 1970, Hod set up his ambush. He sent a pair of Phantoms as a bait while, high above them, his Mirages were waiting for the Russians to strike. Minutes later, six quartets of Soviet-manned MiG 21s arrived from three airfields. The battle lasted only four minutes, but at the end of it the Russians had lost five aircraft.

In September 1970 King Hussein of Jordan asked the Americans to save his throne, following an attempt by Palestinians to topple him and a Syrian invasion into Jordan in support of the Palestinian action. The Americans asked Israel to intervene and, because Israel wished the King to stay in power, it agreed.

Hod recalled: "I got the authorisation to send Phantoms over the Syrian tanks, and personally briefed the leader of the quartet. I told him, 'You fly over the Syrians . . . have no doubt that they see you and hear you. And make mock attacks at them so that they understand that we want them to turn around and go back to Syria.' And that's just what we did . . . and the Syrian tanks turned around and went back. A quartet of Phantoms was enough."

In April 1973, after seven years as Commander of the Air Force, Hod retired; but when the Yom Kippur War broke out later that year, he was brought back as the Air Force adviser to the Commander of Northern command. With Skyhawk squadrons, Hod blocked Syrian attempts to penetrate the southern section of the Golan Heights.

Having finally retired from the IAF, Hod was an assistant to the Defence Minister, in charge of developing projects in the Defence Ministry. From 1975 to 1977 he was founder and President of CAL Cargo Airlines and, from 1977 to 1979, President of El Al Israeli Airlines. He was also chairman of Israel Aircraft Industries.

He met his wife, Penina, while she was serving as a sergeant in the Air Force.